Fic: Frameshift (Fringe, PG) 1/2
Title: Frameshift
Category/Rating: Fringe/Firestarter, PG
Summary: Fringe Division picks up a new case. Parallels abound. (post-season 4)
Disclaimer: I have taken liberties. Many of them.
A/N: For , who asked for the Bishop boys interacting, and then offered me free reign. Sadly, the reigns were a little too free. Hope you like it anyhow.
Thanks to for the beta. All remaining mistakes belong to me.
Below the cut, or read in its entirety on DW or AO3
::
“So?” Peter asks as he reaches mugs out of the cupboard. “How’s your sister?”
“Good.” Olivia grabs the bakery bag off the table and fishes through it. “Surprised I called, I think. We don’t talk as much as we used to, or at least how I remember we used to.” She frowns and looks up at Peter. “You ate all the croissants already?”
Peter takes the bag and offers her the bagel he’s already plated instead. “You don’t usually like them so I only got one.”
“It’s never not going to be weird, is it?” she asks.
“You wanting croissants? No. That’s always going to be a red flag for me.” He pours the coffee and leans back against the kitchen counter, mug in hand.
She shakes her head at him, but she’s smiling because she’s missed how easy it is to just be with Peter. “Knowing things about people’s lives that haven’t happened to them. Having a nephew I can barely remember ever meeting, even though I’ve found at least half a dozen pictures of him and Ella and myself from the last time I was in Chicago.” She feels, not for the first time, the weight of what’s been lost. But she’d made the choice with her eyes wide open and the regrets are hers to live with. Still, it doesn’t stop her from leaning in when Peter brushes his fingers against her cheek. They’re his lost histories too, and that makes the sting of missing them feel not quite so sharp. She takes a sip of her tea.
“Maybe you should go visit them,” he suggests. “Get to know them all over again.”
She puts her mug aside and considers it. “If you come with me. Besides, Rachel says she wants to meet the guy who finally managed to tie her wayward big sister down.”
“Tie you down?” He raises and eyebrow. “She does know you’re the one with the handcuffs, right?”
She spies Peter’s plate (and the single croissant) on the counter, hidden behind him, and decides she needs a diversion. “You don’t like the handcuffs?”
“I love your handcuffs. I love the things you do with your handcuffs.”
"Good. Enjoy it while you can, apparently," she tells him as she slips one hand under his shirt to distract him and grabs his half-eaten croissant off his plate with the other. "Rachel just had fun listing all the things that aren't going to be happening after the baby's born." She raises one eyebrow suggestively as she bites the croissant.
"Did she now?" Peter makes a half-hearted grab for his breakfast, but she holds it out of his arm's reach. He catches the edge of her bathrobe instead and pulls her toward him by her collar. "Let me guess. 'You'll never get another full night's sleep again'? Or how about 'You’ll never eat at another restaurant without a kid's menu'."
Olivia pulls a piece of croissant loose and offers it to Peter. "'You'll never get to use the shower by yourself again."
"I don't now," he manages to answer before she shoves the pastry in his mouth. "Hey," he protests, but pulls her close so she's standing between his bare feet, pressed up close to him. "What else did she say?"
Olivia slips her hand under his shirt again and drags her fingers along his ribs before she tucks them into the waistband at the back of his jeans. "She said to get a lock for the bedroom door."
Just as she leans in to kiss his jaw, her cellphone rings. Then Peter's. She drops her head to his chest and groans.
Peter's lips brush the top of her head as he reaches to the counter behind him to check the call display. "Did she say anything about never, ever buying the kid its own cell phone?"
::
The fire, which had all but gutted the loading docks at the north end of the warehouse, was out by the time they arrived and the last of the hoses were being rolled and packed back onto the fire trucks. Broyles is waiting beside the arson squad’s truck with Walter, who is impatiently shuffling his feet while he arranges and rearranges the two large black briefcases at his feet.
Peter nods a greeting to a harried looking Agent Tim, who’s hanging as far back as he can and still be considered on escort duty. He leans toward Olivia and asks, “You gotta wonder who he pissed off to keep getting stuck with this assignment.”
“He’s got a crush on Astrid,” she whispers back without moving her lips.
Peter looks at her sharply. “He does know what he’s getting into with this family, right?”
“Tim’s been with us since Walter was released from St. Claire’s. I think he’s got a pretty good idea. Besides,” she tilts her head closer so they won’t be overheard, “he’s not Astrid’s type.”
“Really? What type is that?”
“Not FBI.”
Peter winces. “Poor guy.”
They’ve reached the group, so Olivia just shrugs before she turns to Broyles. “Sir.”
“Dunham,” Broyles nods, looking slightly less composed than usual. His eyes cut toward Walter. “About time.”
“Where’s Astrid?” she asks.
“Agent Farnsworth…” Walter says in a voice loud enough to carry over a string and a pair of tin cans, never mind the modified earpiece he’s wearing. He holds a hand up to his ear and cocks his head while he listens. “Agent Farnsworth says ‘Good morning and stop shouting Walter.’” He straightens. “Agent Farnsworth says good morning from the lab,” he answers formally, and then turns away from them with his hand still covering his ear. “Try turning down the gain… over on the left hand side of the control board.” A squelch of static filters out from his ear piece and Walter winces. “Left hand side,” he shouts into the earpiece’s microphone. “Left!”
“Agent Farnsworth’s still on light-duty, pending final medical evaluation,” Broyles supplies. He gives Olivia a pointed look that’s clearly meant to say ’as certain other agents should be’.
Olivia straightens. “Astrid was shot, sir.”
But Broyles isn’t buying it. “So were you.”
“Extenuating circumstances.” Olivia looks back at Broyles and refuses to blink.
“And the fire?” Peter interrupts. He’d tried to convince Olivia to take more time off after the business with Bell, telling her he was being selfish and calling in the ‘saving the universe’ clause he claimed was in his contract, but after a week away, Olivia had already started feeling restless and itchy to get back to work. There are still loose ends she wants to tie up and reports she wants to read.
Other Cortexiphan children she needs to track down.
“Alarm company called the fire in just after 3:20 this morning.” Broyles turns and leads them past a pair of nondescript black sedans parked tight against the cinderblock building, and through what’s left of the warehouse’s side door. Peter catches Olivia’s sleeve and nods toward the front of the cars where the plastic bumpers are twisted and deformed. She crouches down to examine one of the headlights and notices the lens had been turned a milky-beige from the heat.
“Arson?” Olivia asks Broyles when she and Peter catch up with the rest of the group outside a soda-cracker box of an office next to the loading docks.
Broyles shakes his head. “If it is, the burn pattern isn’t like anything the arson investigators have ever seen.” He doesn’t bother with the door; there’s nothing left except the hinges hanging like a pair of haphazard Post-It notes from the doorframe, a pile of tempered glass pebbles, and a metal sign plate, the words ’ping Office - all drivers must report with paperwor’ still legible, on the floor.
The rest of the office is surprisingly intact, with the exception of the small window that looks out on to the warehouse floor and the scorch marks blackening the walls and ceiling. The laminate top of the industrial grade desk is blistered and burnt, but it’s still recognizable, as if the fire had burned hot and fast before putting itself out. The single desk chair’s seating‘s been incinerated, leaving nothing but the steel frame and four heat-flattened casters.
The white-on-black halo of unmarred drywall is roughly person-shaped and the only part of the room that hasn’t been licked by fire.
Olivia steps around the rest of the group and stops facing the far corner of the room. Thankfully Peter’s there to answer Broyles with, “But we have” because her mouth has gone suddenly dry.
She’s been in a room like this before, and if whatever went on here is anything like the daycare in Jacksonville, the empty corner is also their likely point of ignition.
She knows Peter’s right beside her but she doesn’t look away from the wall until she feels his finger brush across the back of her hand, and when she does finally turn, it’s so the unburnt section is completely out of sight. Peter doesn’t ask if she’s okay, but the question is still there, unspoken. She presses her lips together and gives him a sharp nod.
“Walter found legs,” he reports.
There must be something in her expression because he’s quick to clarify. “Men’s legs. Two pairs and a spare. The rest of the bodies are just ash.” Peter points to the desk where Tim’s holding a black rubber bag at arm’s length. “Looks like there was a man in a suit at the desk, and another two in boots and fatigues by the door.”
Walter’s voice comes from somewhere on the other side. “Unless we have a three-legged man running around.” His face appears above the edge of the desk as he considers what he’s just said. “Of course he wouldn’t be doing much running without his legs now, would he?” Walter drops a dark gray wool clad thigh and calf into the bag with a liquid plop, then tosses its tasseled loafer in as an afterthought. He turns to Tim. “We need to get our combustible friend here back to the lab, young man. Quickly now.”
Tim, trying to look anywhere but at the bag he’s been tasked with, follows Walter out of the room. Once they’re out of earshot, Peter leans toward Olivia again. “You sure he didn’t piss someone off?”
“I fill out his performance reviews.”
Olivia breathes through her mouth as they poke through the charred remains of the office; she’d forgotten how pungent burnt flesh could smell in a small space, or maybe she’s just never noticed before now. It only takes them another ten minutes to decide that there’s nothing else worth noting that hasn’t either been collected by Walter, or rendered completely unrecognizable from the heat. Still, she’s sure there’s something they haven’t accounted for here.
“What are you thinking?” Peter asks as they pick their way back through the warehouse.
She makes a humming noise, not yet ready to commit to a theory. “I think that there was somebody else in the room with those men,” she offers finally. Peter turns toward her, trying to get a better read on her. Even though he doesn’t say it, she can tell he’s thinking about what they found in Jacksonville too.
Something above catches her eye. She stops and looks up at the ceiling. It takes Peter three full strides before he realizes Olivia’s not beside him anymore. “Look.” She points above them.
“It’s not burnt,” he says once he joins her. The warehouse is older, built back in the day when fresh product was loaded onto trucks for local delivery, not frozen and then stacked in shipping containers bound for all points of the compass. The ceiling here by the loading docks is only about twelve feet high, concrete, and laced with cables and wires and pipes carrying ammonia between the compressor station and the cooler. And while the walls and floors are nearly black with several decade’s worth of diesel soot, making any fire damage nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the grime, the wires and cables definitely look like they’ve been exposed to significant heat; they’re sagging in some places, while in others, they’ve melted clean through and hang like greasy icicles from their steel brackets.
“The report says the fire was confined to the office and the first three doors of the loading dock.” Olivia flips through the folder Broyles had left with her and turns to look back the way they’d come. “It didn’t touch anything else along the dock.”
Peter pokes through a pile of broken wood pallets and strapping by the wall. “This is all dry.” One of the pallet slats pops like a cap gun when he bends it with his boot. “If the fire was hot enough here to melt those wires, this junk would’ve gone up like matchsticks.”
“Those cars,” Olivia tips her head and points toward the door they first came through. “The bumpers were melted, but not burnt.”
“Like they were exposed to some pretty high temperatures.” Peter agrees. He brushes his hands on his pants and manages to raise a cloud of black dust around him. “This is probably toxic.” He settles for just wiping his hands together and smearing the dirt. “Breathing this in probably isn’t a good idea.”
“There were finger marks embedded in the plastic of the headlight.” She ignores Peter’s comment about the dust; it’s not like she was planning on lingering here anyhow. “Somebody touched it when it was still warm. We should get photos before they tow the cars.”
“I don’t know about you, but to me those cars looked government fleet to me.” Peter pulls his phone from his pocket. “I think we’re also going to want to run a check on the VIN numbers.”
They head back toward the door they came in. By the time they hit the parking lot, most of the fire trucks and emergency personnel are gone. So is the pair of black sedans.
“I’ll see if Broyles can track them down,” Olivia says as she hits speed dial on her phone.
She finds Peter on the other side of the parking lot a few minutes later. “According to Broyles, nobody gave the order to tow the cars,” she tells him. “We’re trying to find out who took custody, but without a VIN or the plate numbers… ” she shrugs. “There’s a camera,” she points to the warehouse’s roofline, “but it wasn’t pointed toward that end of the building.”
“What about the alarm company?” he asks.
Olivia shakes her head. “Find something?”
“I noticed when we got here that this side of the alley is all residential, so I thought somebody might have seen something, but no such luck. The hedges here would’ve been too thick, especially in the dark. But I also saw this,” Peter holds out the bunch of leaves he’d torn from the hedge. “Notice anything about them?”
The leaves are wilted and dry, curled up around themselves. They crumble easily between her fingers. “They’ve been scorched,” she says. “Like our missing cars.” Peter nods.
Olivia looks down the alley and notices that the privacy hedge runs the entire length of the block. It’s not a perfect breadcrumb trail, but even from here she can see patches of discolored leaves and bunches of browned lilac flowers pointing the way, and she feels the familiar thrum of adrenaline she always gets when they pick up a lead.
“I think we might know where our witness went,” she says as she takes off at trot, trusting that Peter will follow her.
But the trail of wilted bushes ends along with the alley at a cross street; more residential to the south, while a collection of storefronts - a dry cleaner’s, two liquor stores, a pair of restaurants, and a twenty-four hour convenience store make up the first block and a half of the north side. Peter barely hesitates before he heads north.
“What makes you think whoever was at the warehouse came this way?” Olivia asks as they pass the dry cleaner’s.
“No reason.” Peter turns to her in front of the first restaurant - one of those all-night places where you can get burgers and fries at midnight, pancakes in the afternoon, and coffee strong enough to stand your spoon up in at any hour of the day. “But somebody cheated me out of my breakfast and now I’m starving.” Peter is, after all, his father’s son and breakfast is sacred. He holds the door open as an invitation.
Olivia narrows her eyes at him as she walks by him. “I know what you’re doing.”
“Me?” He’s all wide-eyed innocence but she doesn’t believe him for a second. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The bell above the door tinkles as it closes behind him. Peter’s usually better at the laissez-faire partner act; he still prides himself on being able to read what people need, knowing when to push and when to ease back and wait for them to find their own way to a common conclusion. But he’s also got a deeply ingrained fear of something terrible happening to the people he cares for, and Olivia knows that the last few weeks… no, the last few months, have pushed him close to his breaking point. He doesn’t have to say anything for her to know that the shooting still scares him; the way he sleeps with some part of his body always touching hers and wakes with a start if she rolls away from him in her sleep is enough for her to give him a pass.
Olivia’s mouth starts watering the moment she smells the grease from the deep fryers, proving his point. She picks a booth at the far end of the diner and grabs a menu from the holder on the table.
“Besides,” Peter says as he shucks his jacket and slides in across from her, “if your blood sugar weren’t so low, you might have noticed that at least three of the places on this block probably have security cameras pointed toward the street.”
Olivia looks out the window and realizes that they’re across the street from one of the liquor stores. A large black and yellow ‘Video Surveillance in Effect’ sign takes up more real estate on the door than the list of credit cards the store accepts. She smoothes her hand over her head, flattening wisps of hair that won’t stay tied back, and turns back to Peter.
She knows it’s not a jab at her capabilities; it’s Peter’s way of letting her know that while he’s got her back, she’s not operating at peak efficiency. It’s a gentle reminder that she needs to remember to take care of herself. He’s been doing this as long as she’s known him. He’s doing a good job of keeping the conversation away from any discussion about whether or not she should be out in the field at all, even though she knows her (and by proxy, the baby’s) well-being and safety is front and center on his mind right now. He worries about them, and in that way too, he is very much his father’s son.
She reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. “Point taken.” The crease between his eyes softens a bit. Olivia glances down at the menu and picks the first thing she sees. She’s too hungry to care. “Order the Big Breakfast for me? I need to find the washroom.” She holds up both her soot and dust-smeared hands.
“Sausage or bacon?”
“Both?”
Peter grins. “You really are an all-or-nothing kind of girl.”
::
Olivia passes the girl sitting by herself in the next booth over on her way to the washroom and doesn’t think anything of the lingering smell of smoke around her until she’s washing her hands.
It takes a fair amount of soap and hot water to get them clean and by the time she’s done, the sink looks like it too could use a good cleaning. She reaches for some paper to wipe it down, but the restaurant still uses the continuous cloth roll dispenser, so she settles for splashing most of the grime away with a couple of handfuls of water. She pulls on the towel to unroll a fresh swatch, and as the used section furls back up into the dispenser, she notices the black streaks that match the spatters she’d just rinsed out of the sink.
On the way back to the table, Olivia pays closer attention. The girl is young - eight, maybe nine years old, her soft cheeks at odds with the rest of her coltish figure, too young to be dining alone. She’s watching Olivia from the cover of her menu and cuts her eyes away just as Olivia passes, feigning disinterest, though her back is stiff and her muscles tense, reminding Olivia very much of a yearling deer grazing at the side of the road but ready to bolt at the first sign of threat.
“We might not need that footage after all,” Olivia whispers as she slides in across from Peter. She angles her head to the side and watches as Peter’s eyes follow.
“How do you want to handle it?” he asks. They’re interrupted by their orders arriving. Peter keeps one eye on the girl even as he smiles at the waitress and gives her a charming “Thanks Marge," that’s all teeth and dimples and makes Marge’s apple cheeks pink up. Olivia would’ve been tempted to kick him under the table if she didn’t secretly enjoy watching him work, knowing that while Peter loved to play the charmer when he could, she’s the one who gets to take him home with her.
“Let’s just see what she does.” Besides, now that the plate of food is sitting in front of her, Olivia feels almost dizzy with hunger.
As it turns out, they don’t have to wait long.
“You ready to order yet, sweetie?” Marge taps her pen impatiently on her order pad. The girl flips the menu pages back and forth, stalling for a bit more time.
“Listen, you can’t stay here all day if you don’t order something,” Marge tells her. “The lunch crowd is gonna start and we’ll need the booth.”
The girl tenses and drops one hand out of sight to grab something beside her on the booth, and Olivia knows she’s about to bolt. They’ll lose her and they’ll lose their lead.
“Honey, why don’t you come back and sit with us and order,” Peter speaks up. Marge turns to them, surprise quickly turning to suspicion at the pair of strangers and their sudden interest in this child. Peter smiles up at Marge again. “Kids. Always pushing those boundaries.”
Something warm brushes through Olivia’s her mind, gentle as fingertips across her scalp. “Come on, Charlie,” she says and it just feels right, like the name’s been there on the tip of her tongue the whole time. She slides over to make room beside her in the booth. “Come and eat lunch.” She looks at Marge and shrugs in what she hopes comes across looking something like an apology. The girl - Charlie - drops a tattered backpack onto the seat next to Olivia and slides in beside her, mumbling out her order.
“Charlie?” Marge asks. “That really your name?” Olivia has to give her props for asking; it’d be too easy in this neighborhood just turn a blind eye on some runaway kid.
“It’s really Charlene,” the girl says, “but she,” a nod in Olivia’s direction, “always calls me Charlie.” Olivia feels that touch again, feather light, and as she watches, Charlie eyes go wide for a second and then she seems to grow with confidence. “See, she used to have a good friend name Charlie. He was a cop too, except- “
“What’d we tell you about sharing with people you don’t know, kiddo?” Peter interrupts before all of Olivia’s secrets can be spilled. He’s managing to pull off his casually neutral look, but she can see the alarm there too, just below the surface.
“Don’t?” Charlie shrugs at him, as if this is an old argument. She turns back to Marge and says matter-of-factly, pointing to Olivia's jacket lapel, “She could show you her badge if you want?”
The door chime tinkles as the door opens to let in a trio of men in work boots and orange safety vests, and Marge seems to decide she’s satisfied with the story. She tears the top sheet off her pad. “I’ll get the cook to put a rush on this,” she tells them and then goes to greet the latest crowd with a pot of coffee.
Once Marge’s out of earshot, Peter leans in across the table. “You two thinking of taking that act on the road?”
“It wasn’t me,” Olivia protests. At least she doesn’t think it was; she hasn’t tried to use any of her Cortexiphan-induced powers since leaving the hospital. The last couple of weeks have felt like the closest thing to normal she’s known in a long time and she’s been unwilling to upset that particular applecart.
Beside her, Charlie’s drawing pictures with her finger in the condensation on the outside of her water glass and pretending she’s not listening to everything going on around her. Her blond hair falls across her face, hiding the smudge of soot along her cheekbone that she’d missed when she’d washed up earlier. For a moment, she’s not this girl, Charlie, but Olivia herself some twenty-odd years ago, sitting at the last bus stop on Fifth Street with the smell of smoke still lingering on her clothes and in her hair, trying to convince herself to just keep going, just get away from the needles and the exercises and the tests.
She reaches out, hesitates, then tucks a stand of hair behind Charlie’s ear. She wants to wipe the smudge from her cheek, but that might be pushing it, the contact too personal. She draws her fingers around her thumb and pulls back. The girl is watching her with eyes that should belong to someone much older and Olivia gets the feeling that Charlie’s trying to see something in her too, trying to touch her again, like she did earlier.
Olivia’s aware that Peter’s watching them both carefully, but he’s holding back, unwilling to interrupt just yet. “You were the one at the warehouse, weren’t you, Charlie,” she says softly. It’s not a question.
Charlie flinches and it feels like a spell has been broken. Olivia heart’s racing and she’s out of breath. The girl’s already grabbing for her backpack, but Olivia puts a hand on her arm and she stops. Charlie doesn’t quite relax, but she also doesn’t run. Her muscles are trembling under Olivia’s fingers. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Peter rub at the back of his neck.
“I did that once too,” Olivia says. She thinks of the daycare and tries to hold the image of being that little girl she once was, crouching and scared in the corner of the burnt room, steady in her mind.
All at once Charlie deflates. She seems to shrink back into herself and become nothing more than a tired, hungry child sorely in need of a warm meal and a bath. Olivia brushes the hair back from her eyes again and pauses this time to rub the soot off her cheek. “There are some people I’d like you to come and meet. People who might be able to help you,” she tells Charlie. “Would you like to do that?”
Charlie looks at her and nods. Across the table, Peter rubs a hand over his face and lets out a breath. He doesn't tell her until later how he'd felt the temperature in the diner suddenly drop.
::
The Walgreens on Beacon Street is bright enough to hurt his eyes and make them water, but it's also busy at half past three in the afternoon, and that's why Andy chose it - plenty of cover. That, and a fine selection of analgesics, both prescription if he's desperate enough, and off the shelf. There's an icepick jabbing its way through his skull, but it's not bad enough to hold up the pharmacist for his supply of Percodan just yet. He didn't have to push the cab driver that hard to let him out without paying the fare.
From behind the display of greeting cards and magazines, he can see the nondescript dark sedan pull up out front. It's sitting in one of the handicap spots, but he doesn’t need to check for the sticker or the hang tag on the mirror to know that it doesn't belong there; this car, or another one like it, has been following him for the last three days. Sometimes he only sees it like a shadow in the corner of his eye; sometimes it's sitting there boldly, waiting for him to move.
This one is meant to be a diversion. There's probably another one idling in the alley out back, waiting to pinch the net shut around him. Andy looks over his shoulder. Two girls in their late teens are giggling over a greeting card with kittens on the front. Farther down the aisle, a short woman with tightly permed blue-gray hair is loading discounted bottles of vitamins into her shopping basket by the handful. Neither she, nor the girls, could pass for Shop agents.
Andy glances up at the convex mirror mounted from the ceiling and sees the pair of men in black suits striding down aisle six - shampoo and hair coloring- with a purpose. And if he can see them in the mirror…
Andy turns the corner and heads down the First Aid aisle as casually as possible, keeping his eye on the rent-a-cop by the front doors. Andy sticks an elbow out as he passes one of those cardboard displays of bandages with super-hero characters on them and knocks it over with a crash. Rent-a-cop turns, takes a step in his direction, and when Andy's certain he's got the man's attention he grabs a package of Advil off the shelf and shoves it in his jacket pocket.
Rent-a-cop shouts at him to freeze. Andy glances up at the security mirror. The suits have both stopped and are looking for the source of the commotion. Rent-a-cop's almost on him blocking the route to the front doors.
Andy turns toward him and breaks into a run.
::
"So what've we got?" Astrid settles in on the lab stool and pulls up a variety of logon boxes and search screens on her computer.
Peter doesn't hear her at first. He's watching the scene across the lab where Charlie's sitting next to Olivia on the exam table while Walter pokes and prods, and shines lights into the girl's eyes. Olivia holds out her hand to Charlie when Walter drags his tray of syringes and collection tubes over.
Charlie gets a look at what's on the tray, and pulls back, eyes wide, then looks up at Olivia. Olivia nods. Charlie takes her hand.
Walter looks between the two of them frowning like he's just been faced with a new puzzle, and that's when Peter realizes neither that Charlie nor Olivia have spoken a word and his gut tightens.
Astrid touches Peter's arm. "Peter?"
"Hmm?" he blinks. "Sorry Astrid. What did you say?" Then he notices her screen and gives her his full attention. "We weren't able to get much out of her on the ride back here, but we do know her name's Charlene McGee, eight years old. Father's name is Andy, mother's deceased. Originally from Ohio, but she hasn't been back there in a long time."
"How long is long?" Astrid asks as she types in the information.
"Hard to say. When I was eight, forty seemed ancient. Now," he winces. "Different story."
Astrid smiles. "So assuming that we're not dealing with time dilation, time travel, or any other sort of chronological disruption in this case…" she checks a couple of boxes, "we can widen the search over the full eight years." She looks up to find Peter staring at her with a raised eyebrow. "What?"
Peter turns to her. "'Chronological disruption'?"
Astrid looks up at him. "Hey, working out of this lab is a hell of a lot more educational than most post-grad programs. I've picked up a thing or two." Her tone might come off as being deeply offended, but Astrid's smiling.
Peter raises his hands. "Hey, I'm the last one to argue that."
"At least I didn't forge any of my degrees." Peter opens his mouth to protest, but Astrid holds up a hand to cut him off. "Olivia and I talk."
::
"Intriguing." Walter flips through the stack of papers the lab printer is in the process of spitting out. "Peter, come look at this." He waves Peter over without looking up from the printouts. "See this here?" He jabs at the papers. "And here?"
Peter leans over his shoulder. "What am I looking at, Walter?"
"The girl's DNA profile."
"That was fast," Peter says. "It's only been what, three hours?"
"Two and a half," Walter answers absently, still engrossed in the report. "The new sequencer is marvelous."
Peter can't argue that. One benefit of saving the universe was the improved stream of resources at Fringe Division's disposal, the direct result being new equipment, most of it furnished by Massive Dynamic. "So tell me again," Peter asks, "If we've suddenly got this new and improved budget, why are we still working out of here?"
Walter looks up at him sharply, brows furrowed. "Why wouldn't we?"
The question reminds Peter that the Harvard lab, with its poor lighting, strange odors, and temperamental thermostat is more than just a workplace for Walter - it's his home. He touches Walter's shoulder and smiles.
"No reason." Peter leans over Walter's shoulder again. "So what've we got here?"
"See this here?" Walter points to a line of lettered code. "This series of nucleotides is out of order."
"And that's how Charlie can light fires?" It seems like a leap to Peter, though with all he's seen, he shouldn't be surprised. It just seems too simple a solution. "I'm assuming you checked for traces of Cortexiphan and other substances?"
"Of course," Walter says sounding slightly annoyed that Peter would doubt his methodology, then squints at the report again. "Fascinating."
"You're sure?" Peter asks. "I mean, human DNA has what, sixty possible codons that make up the genetic code? And a lot of them are redundant."
"Sixty-four," Walter corrects him.
"So how can you be sure that this little piece of code that's been reshuffled is the cause?"
"Because the sequence hasn't been reshuffled. It's been shifted over." Walter finally looks up from the report. "There are extra nucleotides in this sequence here, and," he stabs at the paper, "here."
Peter's still not quite sure he's caught up to Walter yet. "Couldn't it just be some random mutation?"
"No." Walter picks up a piece of chalk and flips his blackboard over to the clean side. "These," he writes the letters T, G, and G, "Thymine followed by a pair of Guanine molecules are the codons that define the formation of Tryptophan… the recipe, if you will."
"Isn't that what makes you feel sleepy after a big turkey dinner?" Astrid asks from where she's leaning against a lab bench with her arms crossed. Peter hadn't heard her approach.
Walter points to Astrid. "Precisely." He turns back to the board, not to be distracted from his lesson. "Now suppose we were to drop another ingredient into the mix," he adds the letter T in front of the first three letters. "What do we get?"
Walter turns and looks from Peter to Astrid expectantly.
"You got me there, Walter," Peter says, hoping he'll get to the point. But Walter does love an audience, and while they're waiting for the results of Astrid's search to come in, he's got a captive one.
Astrid takes a step over to the board and picks up a piece of chalk. "No, I see it." She draws a vertical line in front of the set of letter, then another after the third. It reminds Peter of a music staff divided into measures of three beats each.
"You read the code in three letter frames," Astrid explains. She circles the first three letters in the measure. "So if you add a letter to the recipe at the beginning, it shifts the entire code in each frame over by one letter. Which in this case makes… I don't know what it makes. Walter?" Astrid hands him her piece of chalk.
Walter smiles at Peter smugly. "In this case, TTG is the recipe for Leucine." He writes it on the board and nods to Astrid. "Excellent, my dear."
"So what does all this have to do with Charlie? How do you know this isn't just some random mutation?" Peter argues.
"Because," Walter rounds the bench and picks up the report again. "The location of this particular mutation is what's key. Here, and here," he points to lines of code on the page, "these traits are recessively inherited. From the mother, and from the father. Much like coloring of a cat's coat."
"Walter," Peter pushes him. "You're saying this girl inherited the ability to start fires with her mind?"
"Among other things, yes," Walter answers simply.
Peter sighs and rubs his eyes. There's something about this that isn't sitting right with him, but he can't quite put his finger on it. "So how did you know to look for this particular mutation?"
Walter turns back to his printouts and shuffles through his test tubes on the bench in front of him.
"Walter?" Peter tries again. "How do you know about this mutation?"
Walter doesn't acknowledge the question. Not until Olivia asks it again from where she'd been standing unnoticed at the top of the stairs. "Walter, how did you know?"
Her voice is steady, but Peter can see the knuckles of her hand wrapped around her cell phone have gone white. The lab seems quieter than usual. Even Gene's withholding comment.
Walter finally looks up, his right hand clenching the fingers of his left.
"Because I saw this same mutation when I went back through the data collected during the Cortexiphan trials."
part 2/2
Category/Rating: Fringe/Firestarter, PG
Summary: Fringe Division picks up a new case. Parallels abound. (post-season 4)
Disclaimer: I have taken liberties. Many of them.
A/N: For , who asked for the Bishop boys interacting, and then offered me free reign. Sadly, the reigns were a little too free. Hope you like it anyhow.
Thanks to for the beta. All remaining mistakes belong to me.
Below the cut, or read in its entirety on DW or AO3
::
“So?” Peter asks as he reaches mugs out of the cupboard. “How’s your sister?”
“Good.” Olivia grabs the bakery bag off the table and fishes through it. “Surprised I called, I think. We don’t talk as much as we used to, or at least how I remember we used to.” She frowns and looks up at Peter. “You ate all the croissants already?”
Peter takes the bag and offers her the bagel he’s already plated instead. “You don’t usually like them so I only got one.”
“It’s never not going to be weird, is it?” she asks.
“You wanting croissants? No. That’s always going to be a red flag for me.” He pours the coffee and leans back against the kitchen counter, mug in hand.
She shakes her head at him, but she’s smiling because she’s missed how easy it is to just be with Peter. “Knowing things about people’s lives that haven’t happened to them. Having a nephew I can barely remember ever meeting, even though I’ve found at least half a dozen pictures of him and Ella and myself from the last time I was in Chicago.” She feels, not for the first time, the weight of what’s been lost. But she’d made the choice with her eyes wide open and the regrets are hers to live with. Still, it doesn’t stop her from leaning in when Peter brushes his fingers against her cheek. They’re his lost histories too, and that makes the sting of missing them feel not quite so sharp. She takes a sip of her tea.
“Maybe you should go visit them,” he suggests. “Get to know them all over again.”
She puts her mug aside and considers it. “If you come with me. Besides, Rachel says she wants to meet the guy who finally managed to tie her wayward big sister down.”
“Tie you down?” He raises and eyebrow. “She does know you’re the one with the handcuffs, right?”
She spies Peter’s plate (and the single croissant) on the counter, hidden behind him, and decides she needs a diversion. “You don’t like the handcuffs?”
“I love your handcuffs. I love the things you do with your handcuffs.”
"Good. Enjoy it while you can, apparently," she tells him as she slips one hand under his shirt to distract him and grabs his half-eaten croissant off his plate with the other. "Rachel just had fun listing all the things that aren't going to be happening after the baby's born." She raises one eyebrow suggestively as she bites the croissant.
"Did she now?" Peter makes a half-hearted grab for his breakfast, but she holds it out of his arm's reach. He catches the edge of her bathrobe instead and pulls her toward him by her collar. "Let me guess. 'You'll never get another full night's sleep again'? Or how about 'You’ll never eat at another restaurant without a kid's menu'."
Olivia pulls a piece of croissant loose and offers it to Peter. "'You'll never get to use the shower by yourself again."
"I don't now," he manages to answer before she shoves the pastry in his mouth. "Hey," he protests, but pulls her close so she's standing between his bare feet, pressed up close to him. "What else did she say?"
Olivia slips her hand under his shirt again and drags her fingers along his ribs before she tucks them into the waistband at the back of his jeans. "She said to get a lock for the bedroom door."
Just as she leans in to kiss his jaw, her cellphone rings. Then Peter's. She drops her head to his chest and groans.
Peter's lips brush the top of her head as he reaches to the counter behind him to check the call display. "Did she say anything about never, ever buying the kid its own cell phone?"
::
The fire, which had all but gutted the loading docks at the north end of the warehouse, was out by the time they arrived and the last of the hoses were being rolled and packed back onto the fire trucks. Broyles is waiting beside the arson squad’s truck with Walter, who is impatiently shuffling his feet while he arranges and rearranges the two large black briefcases at his feet.
Peter nods a greeting to a harried looking Agent Tim, who’s hanging as far back as he can and still be considered on escort duty. He leans toward Olivia and asks, “You gotta wonder who he pissed off to keep getting stuck with this assignment.”
“He’s got a crush on Astrid,” she whispers back without moving her lips.
Peter looks at her sharply. “He does know what he’s getting into with this family, right?”
“Tim’s been with us since Walter was released from St. Claire’s. I think he’s got a pretty good idea. Besides,” she tilts her head closer so they won’t be overheard, “he’s not Astrid’s type.”
“Really? What type is that?”
“Not FBI.”
Peter winces. “Poor guy.”
They’ve reached the group, so Olivia just shrugs before she turns to Broyles. “Sir.”
“Dunham,” Broyles nods, looking slightly less composed than usual. His eyes cut toward Walter. “About time.”
“Where’s Astrid?” she asks.
“Agent Farnsworth…” Walter says in a voice loud enough to carry over a string and a pair of tin cans, never mind the modified earpiece he’s wearing. He holds a hand up to his ear and cocks his head while he listens. “Agent Farnsworth says ‘Good morning and stop shouting Walter.’” He straightens. “Agent Farnsworth says good morning from the lab,” he answers formally, and then turns away from them with his hand still covering his ear. “Try turning down the gain… over on the left hand side of the control board.” A squelch of static filters out from his ear piece and Walter winces. “Left hand side,” he shouts into the earpiece’s microphone. “Left!”
“Agent Farnsworth’s still on light-duty, pending final medical evaluation,” Broyles supplies. He gives Olivia a pointed look that’s clearly meant to say ’as certain other agents should be’.
Olivia straightens. “Astrid was shot, sir.”
But Broyles isn’t buying it. “So were you.”
“Extenuating circumstances.” Olivia looks back at Broyles and refuses to blink.
“And the fire?” Peter interrupts. He’d tried to convince Olivia to take more time off after the business with Bell, telling her he was being selfish and calling in the ‘saving the universe’ clause he claimed was in his contract, but after a week away, Olivia had already started feeling restless and itchy to get back to work. There are still loose ends she wants to tie up and reports she wants to read.
Other Cortexiphan children she needs to track down.
“Alarm company called the fire in just after 3:20 this morning.” Broyles turns and leads them past a pair of nondescript black sedans parked tight against the cinderblock building, and through what’s left of the warehouse’s side door. Peter catches Olivia’s sleeve and nods toward the front of the cars where the plastic bumpers are twisted and deformed. She crouches down to examine one of the headlights and notices the lens had been turned a milky-beige from the heat.
“Arson?” Olivia asks Broyles when she and Peter catch up with the rest of the group outside a soda-cracker box of an office next to the loading docks.
Broyles shakes his head. “If it is, the burn pattern isn’t like anything the arson investigators have ever seen.” He doesn’t bother with the door; there’s nothing left except the hinges hanging like a pair of haphazard Post-It notes from the doorframe, a pile of tempered glass pebbles, and a metal sign plate, the words ’ping Office - all drivers must report with paperwor’ still legible, on the floor.
The rest of the office is surprisingly intact, with the exception of the small window that looks out on to the warehouse floor and the scorch marks blackening the walls and ceiling. The laminate top of the industrial grade desk is blistered and burnt, but it’s still recognizable, as if the fire had burned hot and fast before putting itself out. The single desk chair’s seating‘s been incinerated, leaving nothing but the steel frame and four heat-flattened casters.
The white-on-black halo of unmarred drywall is roughly person-shaped and the only part of the room that hasn’t been licked by fire.
Olivia steps around the rest of the group and stops facing the far corner of the room. Thankfully Peter’s there to answer Broyles with, “But we have” because her mouth has gone suddenly dry.
She’s been in a room like this before, and if whatever went on here is anything like the daycare in Jacksonville, the empty corner is also their likely point of ignition.
She knows Peter’s right beside her but she doesn’t look away from the wall until she feels his finger brush across the back of her hand, and when she does finally turn, it’s so the unburnt section is completely out of sight. Peter doesn’t ask if she’s okay, but the question is still there, unspoken. She presses her lips together and gives him a sharp nod.
“Walter found legs,” he reports.
There must be something in her expression because he’s quick to clarify. “Men’s legs. Two pairs and a spare. The rest of the bodies are just ash.” Peter points to the desk where Tim’s holding a black rubber bag at arm’s length. “Looks like there was a man in a suit at the desk, and another two in boots and fatigues by the door.”
Walter’s voice comes from somewhere on the other side. “Unless we have a three-legged man running around.” His face appears above the edge of the desk as he considers what he’s just said. “Of course he wouldn’t be doing much running without his legs now, would he?” Walter drops a dark gray wool clad thigh and calf into the bag with a liquid plop, then tosses its tasseled loafer in as an afterthought. He turns to Tim. “We need to get our combustible friend here back to the lab, young man. Quickly now.”
Tim, trying to look anywhere but at the bag he’s been tasked with, follows Walter out of the room. Once they’re out of earshot, Peter leans toward Olivia again. “You sure he didn’t piss someone off?”
“I fill out his performance reviews.”
Olivia breathes through her mouth as they poke through the charred remains of the office; she’d forgotten how pungent burnt flesh could smell in a small space, or maybe she’s just never noticed before now. It only takes them another ten minutes to decide that there’s nothing else worth noting that hasn’t either been collected by Walter, or rendered completely unrecognizable from the heat. Still, she’s sure there’s something they haven’t accounted for here.
“What are you thinking?” Peter asks as they pick their way back through the warehouse.
She makes a humming noise, not yet ready to commit to a theory. “I think that there was somebody else in the room with those men,” she offers finally. Peter turns toward her, trying to get a better read on her. Even though he doesn’t say it, she can tell he’s thinking about what they found in Jacksonville too.
Something above catches her eye. She stops and looks up at the ceiling. It takes Peter three full strides before he realizes Olivia’s not beside him anymore. “Look.” She points above them.
“It’s not burnt,” he says once he joins her. The warehouse is older, built back in the day when fresh product was loaded onto trucks for local delivery, not frozen and then stacked in shipping containers bound for all points of the compass. The ceiling here by the loading docks is only about twelve feet high, concrete, and laced with cables and wires and pipes carrying ammonia between the compressor station and the cooler. And while the walls and floors are nearly black with several decade’s worth of diesel soot, making any fire damage nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the grime, the wires and cables definitely look like they’ve been exposed to significant heat; they’re sagging in some places, while in others, they’ve melted clean through and hang like greasy icicles from their steel brackets.
“The report says the fire was confined to the office and the first three doors of the loading dock.” Olivia flips through the folder Broyles had left with her and turns to look back the way they’d come. “It didn’t touch anything else along the dock.”
Peter pokes through a pile of broken wood pallets and strapping by the wall. “This is all dry.” One of the pallet slats pops like a cap gun when he bends it with his boot. “If the fire was hot enough here to melt those wires, this junk would’ve gone up like matchsticks.”
“Those cars,” Olivia tips her head and points toward the door they first came through. “The bumpers were melted, but not burnt.”
“Like they were exposed to some pretty high temperatures.” Peter agrees. He brushes his hands on his pants and manages to raise a cloud of black dust around him. “This is probably toxic.” He settles for just wiping his hands together and smearing the dirt. “Breathing this in probably isn’t a good idea.”
“There were finger marks embedded in the plastic of the headlight.” She ignores Peter’s comment about the dust; it’s not like she was planning on lingering here anyhow. “Somebody touched it when it was still warm. We should get photos before they tow the cars.”
“I don’t know about you, but to me those cars looked government fleet to me.” Peter pulls his phone from his pocket. “I think we’re also going to want to run a check on the VIN numbers.”
They head back toward the door they came in. By the time they hit the parking lot, most of the fire trucks and emergency personnel are gone. So is the pair of black sedans.
“I’ll see if Broyles can track them down,” Olivia says as she hits speed dial on her phone.
She finds Peter on the other side of the parking lot a few minutes later. “According to Broyles, nobody gave the order to tow the cars,” she tells him. “We’re trying to find out who took custody, but without a VIN or the plate numbers… ” she shrugs. “There’s a camera,” she points to the warehouse’s roofline, “but it wasn’t pointed toward that end of the building.”
“What about the alarm company?” he asks.
Olivia shakes her head. “Find something?”
“I noticed when we got here that this side of the alley is all residential, so I thought somebody might have seen something, but no such luck. The hedges here would’ve been too thick, especially in the dark. But I also saw this,” Peter holds out the bunch of leaves he’d torn from the hedge. “Notice anything about them?”
The leaves are wilted and dry, curled up around themselves. They crumble easily between her fingers. “They’ve been scorched,” she says. “Like our missing cars.” Peter nods.
Olivia looks down the alley and notices that the privacy hedge runs the entire length of the block. It’s not a perfect breadcrumb trail, but even from here she can see patches of discolored leaves and bunches of browned lilac flowers pointing the way, and she feels the familiar thrum of adrenaline she always gets when they pick up a lead.
“I think we might know where our witness went,” she says as she takes off at trot, trusting that Peter will follow her.
But the trail of wilted bushes ends along with the alley at a cross street; more residential to the south, while a collection of storefronts - a dry cleaner’s, two liquor stores, a pair of restaurants, and a twenty-four hour convenience store make up the first block and a half of the north side. Peter barely hesitates before he heads north.
“What makes you think whoever was at the warehouse came this way?” Olivia asks as they pass the dry cleaner’s.
“No reason.” Peter turns to her in front of the first restaurant - one of those all-night places where you can get burgers and fries at midnight, pancakes in the afternoon, and coffee strong enough to stand your spoon up in at any hour of the day. “But somebody cheated me out of my breakfast and now I’m starving.” Peter is, after all, his father’s son and breakfast is sacred. He holds the door open as an invitation.
Olivia narrows her eyes at him as she walks by him. “I know what you’re doing.”
“Me?” He’s all wide-eyed innocence but she doesn’t believe him for a second. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The bell above the door tinkles as it closes behind him. Peter’s usually better at the laissez-faire partner act; he still prides himself on being able to read what people need, knowing when to push and when to ease back and wait for them to find their own way to a common conclusion. But he’s also got a deeply ingrained fear of something terrible happening to the people he cares for, and Olivia knows that the last few weeks… no, the last few months, have pushed him close to his breaking point. He doesn’t have to say anything for her to know that the shooting still scares him; the way he sleeps with some part of his body always touching hers and wakes with a start if she rolls away from him in her sleep is enough for her to give him a pass.
Olivia’s mouth starts watering the moment she smells the grease from the deep fryers, proving his point. She picks a booth at the far end of the diner and grabs a menu from the holder on the table.
“Besides,” Peter says as he shucks his jacket and slides in across from her, “if your blood sugar weren’t so low, you might have noticed that at least three of the places on this block probably have security cameras pointed toward the street.”
Olivia looks out the window and realizes that they’re across the street from one of the liquor stores. A large black and yellow ‘Video Surveillance in Effect’ sign takes up more real estate on the door than the list of credit cards the store accepts. She smoothes her hand over her head, flattening wisps of hair that won’t stay tied back, and turns back to Peter.
She knows it’s not a jab at her capabilities; it’s Peter’s way of letting her know that while he’s got her back, she’s not operating at peak efficiency. It’s a gentle reminder that she needs to remember to take care of herself. He’s been doing this as long as she’s known him. He’s doing a good job of keeping the conversation away from any discussion about whether or not she should be out in the field at all, even though she knows her (and by proxy, the baby’s) well-being and safety is front and center on his mind right now. He worries about them, and in that way too, he is very much his father’s son.
She reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. “Point taken.” The crease between his eyes softens a bit. Olivia glances down at the menu and picks the first thing she sees. She’s too hungry to care. “Order the Big Breakfast for me? I need to find the washroom.” She holds up both her soot and dust-smeared hands.
“Sausage or bacon?”
“Both?”
Peter grins. “You really are an all-or-nothing kind of girl.”
::
Olivia passes the girl sitting by herself in the next booth over on her way to the washroom and doesn’t think anything of the lingering smell of smoke around her until she’s washing her hands.
It takes a fair amount of soap and hot water to get them clean and by the time she’s done, the sink looks like it too could use a good cleaning. She reaches for some paper to wipe it down, but the restaurant still uses the continuous cloth roll dispenser, so she settles for splashing most of the grime away with a couple of handfuls of water. She pulls on the towel to unroll a fresh swatch, and as the used section furls back up into the dispenser, she notices the black streaks that match the spatters she’d just rinsed out of the sink.
On the way back to the table, Olivia pays closer attention. The girl is young - eight, maybe nine years old, her soft cheeks at odds with the rest of her coltish figure, too young to be dining alone. She’s watching Olivia from the cover of her menu and cuts her eyes away just as Olivia passes, feigning disinterest, though her back is stiff and her muscles tense, reminding Olivia very much of a yearling deer grazing at the side of the road but ready to bolt at the first sign of threat.
“We might not need that footage after all,” Olivia whispers as she slides in across from Peter. She angles her head to the side and watches as Peter’s eyes follow.
“How do you want to handle it?” he asks. They’re interrupted by their orders arriving. Peter keeps one eye on the girl even as he smiles at the waitress and gives her a charming “Thanks Marge," that’s all teeth and dimples and makes Marge’s apple cheeks pink up. Olivia would’ve been tempted to kick him under the table if she didn’t secretly enjoy watching him work, knowing that while Peter loved to play the charmer when he could, she’s the one who gets to take him home with her.
“Let’s just see what she does.” Besides, now that the plate of food is sitting in front of her, Olivia feels almost dizzy with hunger.
As it turns out, they don’t have to wait long.
“You ready to order yet, sweetie?” Marge taps her pen impatiently on her order pad. The girl flips the menu pages back and forth, stalling for a bit more time.
“Listen, you can’t stay here all day if you don’t order something,” Marge tells her. “The lunch crowd is gonna start and we’ll need the booth.”
The girl tenses and drops one hand out of sight to grab something beside her on the booth, and Olivia knows she’s about to bolt. They’ll lose her and they’ll lose their lead.
“Honey, why don’t you come back and sit with us and order,” Peter speaks up. Marge turns to them, surprise quickly turning to suspicion at the pair of strangers and their sudden interest in this child. Peter smiles up at Marge again. “Kids. Always pushing those boundaries.”
Something warm brushes through Olivia’s her mind, gentle as fingertips across her scalp. “Come on, Charlie,” she says and it just feels right, like the name’s been there on the tip of her tongue the whole time. She slides over to make room beside her in the booth. “Come and eat lunch.” She looks at Marge and shrugs in what she hopes comes across looking something like an apology. The girl - Charlie - drops a tattered backpack onto the seat next to Olivia and slides in beside her, mumbling out her order.
“Charlie?” Marge asks. “That really your name?” Olivia has to give her props for asking; it’d be too easy in this neighborhood just turn a blind eye on some runaway kid.
“It’s really Charlene,” the girl says, “but she,” a nod in Olivia’s direction, “always calls me Charlie.” Olivia feels that touch again, feather light, and as she watches, Charlie eyes go wide for a second and then she seems to grow with confidence. “See, she used to have a good friend name Charlie. He was a cop too, except- “
“What’d we tell you about sharing with people you don’t know, kiddo?” Peter interrupts before all of Olivia’s secrets can be spilled. He’s managing to pull off his casually neutral look, but she can see the alarm there too, just below the surface.
“Don’t?” Charlie shrugs at him, as if this is an old argument. She turns back to Marge and says matter-of-factly, pointing to Olivia's jacket lapel, “She could show you her badge if you want?”
The door chime tinkles as the door opens to let in a trio of men in work boots and orange safety vests, and Marge seems to decide she’s satisfied with the story. She tears the top sheet off her pad. “I’ll get the cook to put a rush on this,” she tells them and then goes to greet the latest crowd with a pot of coffee.
Once Marge’s out of earshot, Peter leans in across the table. “You two thinking of taking that act on the road?”
“It wasn’t me,” Olivia protests. At least she doesn’t think it was; she hasn’t tried to use any of her Cortexiphan-induced powers since leaving the hospital. The last couple of weeks have felt like the closest thing to normal she’s known in a long time and she’s been unwilling to upset that particular applecart.
Beside her, Charlie’s drawing pictures with her finger in the condensation on the outside of her water glass and pretending she’s not listening to everything going on around her. Her blond hair falls across her face, hiding the smudge of soot along her cheekbone that she’d missed when she’d washed up earlier. For a moment, she’s not this girl, Charlie, but Olivia herself some twenty-odd years ago, sitting at the last bus stop on Fifth Street with the smell of smoke still lingering on her clothes and in her hair, trying to convince herself to just keep going, just get away from the needles and the exercises and the tests.
She reaches out, hesitates, then tucks a stand of hair behind Charlie’s ear. She wants to wipe the smudge from her cheek, but that might be pushing it, the contact too personal. She draws her fingers around her thumb and pulls back. The girl is watching her with eyes that should belong to someone much older and Olivia gets the feeling that Charlie’s trying to see something in her too, trying to touch her again, like she did earlier.
Olivia’s aware that Peter’s watching them both carefully, but he’s holding back, unwilling to interrupt just yet. “You were the one at the warehouse, weren’t you, Charlie,” she says softly. It’s not a question.
Charlie flinches and it feels like a spell has been broken. Olivia heart’s racing and she’s out of breath. The girl’s already grabbing for her backpack, but Olivia puts a hand on her arm and she stops. Charlie doesn’t quite relax, but she also doesn’t run. Her muscles are trembling under Olivia’s fingers. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Peter rub at the back of his neck.
“I did that once too,” Olivia says. She thinks of the daycare and tries to hold the image of being that little girl she once was, crouching and scared in the corner of the burnt room, steady in her mind.
All at once Charlie deflates. She seems to shrink back into herself and become nothing more than a tired, hungry child sorely in need of a warm meal and a bath. Olivia brushes the hair back from her eyes again and pauses this time to rub the soot off her cheek. “There are some people I’d like you to come and meet. People who might be able to help you,” she tells Charlie. “Would you like to do that?”
Charlie looks at her and nods. Across the table, Peter rubs a hand over his face and lets out a breath. He doesn't tell her until later how he'd felt the temperature in the diner suddenly drop.
::
The Walgreens on Beacon Street is bright enough to hurt his eyes and make them water, but it's also busy at half past three in the afternoon, and that's why Andy chose it - plenty of cover. That, and a fine selection of analgesics, both prescription if he's desperate enough, and off the shelf. There's an icepick jabbing its way through his skull, but it's not bad enough to hold up the pharmacist for his supply of Percodan just yet. He didn't have to push the cab driver that hard to let him out without paying the fare.
From behind the display of greeting cards and magazines, he can see the nondescript dark sedan pull up out front. It's sitting in one of the handicap spots, but he doesn’t need to check for the sticker or the hang tag on the mirror to know that it doesn't belong there; this car, or another one like it, has been following him for the last three days. Sometimes he only sees it like a shadow in the corner of his eye; sometimes it's sitting there boldly, waiting for him to move.
This one is meant to be a diversion. There's probably another one idling in the alley out back, waiting to pinch the net shut around him. Andy looks over his shoulder. Two girls in their late teens are giggling over a greeting card with kittens on the front. Farther down the aisle, a short woman with tightly permed blue-gray hair is loading discounted bottles of vitamins into her shopping basket by the handful. Neither she, nor the girls, could pass for Shop agents.
Andy glances up at the convex mirror mounted from the ceiling and sees the pair of men in black suits striding down aisle six - shampoo and hair coloring- with a purpose. And if he can see them in the mirror…
Andy turns the corner and heads down the First Aid aisle as casually as possible, keeping his eye on the rent-a-cop by the front doors. Andy sticks an elbow out as he passes one of those cardboard displays of bandages with super-hero characters on them and knocks it over with a crash. Rent-a-cop turns, takes a step in his direction, and when Andy's certain he's got the man's attention he grabs a package of Advil off the shelf and shoves it in his jacket pocket.
Rent-a-cop shouts at him to freeze. Andy glances up at the security mirror. The suits have both stopped and are looking for the source of the commotion. Rent-a-cop's almost on him blocking the route to the front doors.
Andy turns toward him and breaks into a run.
::
"So what've we got?" Astrid settles in on the lab stool and pulls up a variety of logon boxes and search screens on her computer.
Peter doesn't hear her at first. He's watching the scene across the lab where Charlie's sitting next to Olivia on the exam table while Walter pokes and prods, and shines lights into the girl's eyes. Olivia holds out her hand to Charlie when Walter drags his tray of syringes and collection tubes over.
Charlie gets a look at what's on the tray, and pulls back, eyes wide, then looks up at Olivia. Olivia nods. Charlie takes her hand.
Walter looks between the two of them frowning like he's just been faced with a new puzzle, and that's when Peter realizes neither that Charlie nor Olivia have spoken a word and his gut tightens.
Astrid touches Peter's arm. "Peter?"
"Hmm?" he blinks. "Sorry Astrid. What did you say?" Then he notices her screen and gives her his full attention. "We weren't able to get much out of her on the ride back here, but we do know her name's Charlene McGee, eight years old. Father's name is Andy, mother's deceased. Originally from Ohio, but she hasn't been back there in a long time."
"How long is long?" Astrid asks as she types in the information.
"Hard to say. When I was eight, forty seemed ancient. Now," he winces. "Different story."
Astrid smiles. "So assuming that we're not dealing with time dilation, time travel, or any other sort of chronological disruption in this case…" she checks a couple of boxes, "we can widen the search over the full eight years." She looks up to find Peter staring at her with a raised eyebrow. "What?"
Peter turns to her. "'Chronological disruption'?"
Astrid looks up at him. "Hey, working out of this lab is a hell of a lot more educational than most post-grad programs. I've picked up a thing or two." Her tone might come off as being deeply offended, but Astrid's smiling.
Peter raises his hands. "Hey, I'm the last one to argue that."
"At least I didn't forge any of my degrees." Peter opens his mouth to protest, but Astrid holds up a hand to cut him off. "Olivia and I talk."
::
"Intriguing." Walter flips through the stack of papers the lab printer is in the process of spitting out. "Peter, come look at this." He waves Peter over without looking up from the printouts. "See this here?" He jabs at the papers. "And here?"
Peter leans over his shoulder. "What am I looking at, Walter?"
"The girl's DNA profile."
"That was fast," Peter says. "It's only been what, three hours?"
"Two and a half," Walter answers absently, still engrossed in the report. "The new sequencer is marvelous."
Peter can't argue that. One benefit of saving the universe was the improved stream of resources at Fringe Division's disposal, the direct result being new equipment, most of it furnished by Massive Dynamic. "So tell me again," Peter asks, "If we've suddenly got this new and improved budget, why are we still working out of here?"
Walter looks up at him sharply, brows furrowed. "Why wouldn't we?"
The question reminds Peter that the Harvard lab, with its poor lighting, strange odors, and temperamental thermostat is more than just a workplace for Walter - it's his home. He touches Walter's shoulder and smiles.
"No reason." Peter leans over Walter's shoulder again. "So what've we got here?"
"See this here?" Walter points to a line of lettered code. "This series of nucleotides is out of order."
"And that's how Charlie can light fires?" It seems like a leap to Peter, though with all he's seen, he shouldn't be surprised. It just seems too simple a solution. "I'm assuming you checked for traces of Cortexiphan and other substances?"
"Of course," Walter says sounding slightly annoyed that Peter would doubt his methodology, then squints at the report again. "Fascinating."
"You're sure?" Peter asks. "I mean, human DNA has what, sixty possible codons that make up the genetic code? And a lot of them are redundant."
"Sixty-four," Walter corrects him.
"So how can you be sure that this little piece of code that's been reshuffled is the cause?"
"Because the sequence hasn't been reshuffled. It's been shifted over." Walter finally looks up from the report. "There are extra nucleotides in this sequence here, and," he stabs at the paper, "here."
Peter's still not quite sure he's caught up to Walter yet. "Couldn't it just be some random mutation?"
"No." Walter picks up a piece of chalk and flips his blackboard over to the clean side. "These," he writes the letters T, G, and G, "Thymine followed by a pair of Guanine molecules are the codons that define the formation of Tryptophan… the recipe, if you will."
"Isn't that what makes you feel sleepy after a big turkey dinner?" Astrid asks from where she's leaning against a lab bench with her arms crossed. Peter hadn't heard her approach.
Walter points to Astrid. "Precisely." He turns back to the board, not to be distracted from his lesson. "Now suppose we were to drop another ingredient into the mix," he adds the letter T in front of the first three letters. "What do we get?"
Walter turns and looks from Peter to Astrid expectantly.
"You got me there, Walter," Peter says, hoping he'll get to the point. But Walter does love an audience, and while they're waiting for the results of Astrid's search to come in, he's got a captive one.
Astrid takes a step over to the board and picks up a piece of chalk. "No, I see it." She draws a vertical line in front of the set of letter, then another after the third. It reminds Peter of a music staff divided into measures of three beats each.
"You read the code in three letter frames," Astrid explains. She circles the first three letters in the measure. "So if you add a letter to the recipe at the beginning, it shifts the entire code in each frame over by one letter. Which in this case makes… I don't know what it makes. Walter?" Astrid hands him her piece of chalk.
Walter smiles at Peter smugly. "In this case, TTG is the recipe for Leucine." He writes it on the board and nods to Astrid. "Excellent, my dear."
"So what does all this have to do with Charlie? How do you know this isn't just some random mutation?" Peter argues.
"Because," Walter rounds the bench and picks up the report again. "The location of this particular mutation is what's key. Here, and here," he points to lines of code on the page, "these traits are recessively inherited. From the mother, and from the father. Much like coloring of a cat's coat."
"Walter," Peter pushes him. "You're saying this girl inherited the ability to start fires with her mind?"
"Among other things, yes," Walter answers simply.
Peter sighs and rubs his eyes. There's something about this that isn't sitting right with him, but he can't quite put his finger on it. "So how did you know to look for this particular mutation?"
Walter turns back to his printouts and shuffles through his test tubes on the bench in front of him.
"Walter?" Peter tries again. "How do you know about this mutation?"
Walter doesn't acknowledge the question. Not until Olivia asks it again from where she'd been standing unnoticed at the top of the stairs. "Walter, how did you know?"
Her voice is steady, but Peter can see the knuckles of her hand wrapped around her cell phone have gone white. The lab seems quieter than usual. Even Gene's withholding comment.
Walter finally looks up, his right hand clenching the fingers of his left.
"Because I saw this same mutation when I went back through the data collected during the Cortexiphan trials."
part 2/2